The pandemic hasn't even officially started yet; you're making a lot of assumptions about how the situation will unfold that are nowhere near justified. Pieces of paper saying that everything should be alright are one of many things that do not have an impact on the virus. The US has officially done better than most countries with a sick leave policy, although the real state of affairs we won't know for a while and is likely to be horrible.
From afar, the biggest problem looks like the CDCs iron clad grip on test kit certification slowing the response by a month. This compounds a general view of mine that the American healthcare system is crippled by existing regulation that links insurance to employment. Linking emergency response funding to employment is another terrible idea that will hardly assist the situation.
What everyone needed was a disaster preparedness plan. Forcing companies to pay money that they are probably not going to have in a pandemic is a great way to obscure from people how much planning they need to do. Companies don't have magically deep pockets.
> The US has officially done better than most countries with a sick leave policy
This isn't true though. We're simply behind them on the infection timeline, thanks solely to geographical proximity and luck. We're several weeks behind Italy, Korea, Japan, and Iran in terms of how long the virus has been spreading here, and months behind China. You can't compare us now to them now.
We're behind them on the timeline because the president restricted travel from the epicenter back at the end of January [1], and the US is the best prepared country in the world for an epidemic [2]. Italy got its 3rd coronavirus case on Feb. 6 [3], and now its totals are at 10k.
Take a look at the cases/country chart on [4] and sort by cases/population. The US is many orders of magnitude better than European countries. It's absolutely worth comparing for specifically the reasons mentioning in OP's post, that being ahead of this makes all the difference in the world.
And then we proceeded to waste all of that lead time and did nothing with it. We didn't even have a working test until recently.
Meanwhile, we're gonna be at 1,000 confirmed cases in the US in another day or so and the exponential increase is continuing. We're not doing better than European countries by any stretch; what's happening there is going to be happening here in a month's time.
And being "best prepared for an epidemic" may have been true back in 2016, but it's certainly not true under Trump. He fired the highly successful crack epidemiologist team that was initially assembled to fight ebola, and the administration's response to the crisis so far has been largely incoherent, focusing more on the stock market than actually preventing the spread of the disease, and with officials continually contradicting each other and downplaying the serious of the pandemic. Pence, the man in charge of the response, is notable for having presided over an HIV epidemic in his home state. We simply don't have the right people at all in charge to manage this, and that matters greatly. And we still have way too many people not making a livable wage, who aren't guaranteed paid sick days and can't afford to not work.
I'm not a Trump fan, but he made the right choice by shutting down China travel. However, preparedness -- what does that mean? Does that mean we can usually successfully contain illnesses before they break out? That's great, but it's not going to help us anymore. It's already here.
What we need are hospital beds and ventilators. Are we doing ANYTHING to prepare those? Anything at all? Or will we wake up when people are literally dying in the streets, like as is certainly happening in other places in the world?
The US is one plane flight from China and Italy is one plane flight from China. And their testing has reportedly been weak compared to many countries; they might be in a more advanced state of trouble than it appears.
But the major point here I am happy to concede; it is far to early to start comparing how the US is doing with how everyone else is doing.
The flights don't matter anymore. It's already here, and it's clear we won't start doing anything about it until the hospitals start overflowing, so whether that point is in a month or three doesn't seem that much different to me.
I hate to sound so bleak, but I believe it is mostly accurate.
From afar, the biggest problem looks like the CDCs iron clad grip on test kit certification slowing the response by a month. This compounds a general view of mine that the American healthcare system is crippled by existing regulation that links insurance to employment. Linking emergency response funding to employment is another terrible idea that will hardly assist the situation.
What everyone needed was a disaster preparedness plan. Forcing companies to pay money that they are probably not going to have in a pandemic is a great way to obscure from people how much planning they need to do. Companies don't have magically deep pockets.